“Rose, I gotta go,” Ren said, ten steps from Dare’s office in the complex, “but you’ve got to give Diego a bit of room to breathe here. Had I told you to put your paints away, said they were stupid and wouldn’t ever make you any money … would you have done it?”
“Ren.”
“Would you have done it?”
Rose let out a hard breath. “No, but he’s got a chance to be anything. And—”
“And so we’re going to let him be what he wants to be.”
For Ren, it really was that simple. He wanted to be able to tell Diego that, too.
It was a good thing Renzo hung up with his sister before he walked into Dare’s office. Cree took the device from him and tossed it into a box under his arm without a word the second he passed the door’s threshold.
“Hey!”
From behind his massive desk, Dare peered at Renzo over the gathered team that had huddled over piles of familiar black clothing and gear to ready for departure. Already, Renzo didn’t like what he was seeing or what it probably meant.
Dare didn’t make him wait to learn.
“Sorry,” his boss told him, “but all phones are confiscated until you’re back in the country with a report. The job is moved up—we knew it was a possibility given the nature of the situation. The entire team needs to be on a plane within the hour.”
Luv, the young woman he was supposed to be mentoring, pushed away from the wall with a backpack in her outstretched hand for him to take. “Grabbed your gear bag from downstairs—Cree has your clothes.”
“Thanks,” he told her, though his attention was still on Dare. “My brother is flying in tomorrow. He was supposed to be here with me all week.”
“He’s what, seventeen?” Dare grinned, entirely unconcerned when he said, “He’ll be fine. Hell, let Luv look after him for the week. It’ll give her something to do. She’s not going on this job—not since shit changed and all.”
Cree jumped between team members, their voices and questions skipping over Ren’s head because he knew that he didn’t have a choice. Like a robot, he had already started stripping his clothes to get dressed in whatever black ensemble Cree had waiting for him. There was no point in arguing when it came to The League because that wasn’t how it worked.
You did what you were told, or you died.
Renzo signed up for this.
He did his fucking job.
“I’ll look after him,” Luv said, her smile bubbly when Cree came back their way with a pile of clothes in hand for Renzo. “I got your back, Ren.”
“You don’t even know him.”
“Not sure I have to.” The blonde shrugged, and those blue eyes of hers twinkled with mischief. “I just have to keep him out of trouble, right? Easy.”
But was it?
“I’m kinda worried about the kid,” Renzo muttered. “He’s … in a strange place.”
Yeah, that seemed like the right way to say it.
Cree’s dark eyes met Renzo’s. “Sounds like he might be searching for something—why not let him find what he needs to?”
Renzo couldn’t reply when his words were only drowned out by someone else. Dare’s voice boomed over the room with more orders. They had to be out of the building in the next four minutes.
Cree was the last thing he saw before he was shoved out of the office with the rest of the team. “Let her look after him—she’s been bored lately. It won’t hurt.”
Right.
Wouldn’t hurt a bit.
He couldn’t say he knew Luv well enough to trust what Cree said was fact. It bothered him more than he was willing to admit.
FIVE
Diego
McCarran International Airport’s arrivals was like navigating a maze. Well, it wasn’t that bad, but with the amount of people Diego had to duck and swerve on his way through to the luggage carousel, it certainly felt like a damn maze. It wasn’t his first time at the airport. Not even his tenth. Ever since Ren came back years ago, Diego regularly flew back and forth between New York and Las Vegas whenever his older brother worked in Nevada for a stretch of time.
Not that Ren really explained what he did here. Sort of. Diego knew, yes. He understood that Ren worked for a company that called themselves The League. His brother explained—partly—what his business for them boiled down to, and what it meant, but he didn’t go into great detail and made it clear he preferred Diego not to ask questions.
Not that he needed to ask.
Diego got the gist.
Ren worked as an assassin—yeah. A real, actual fucking assassin that was hired to do not so great things to other people or organizations depending on who had enough money to hire him through The League.
It was something Diego tried not to think about. Not because it made him think less of his brother—he understood very well how Renzo found himself in his current situation with The League; he never lied about it—but rather … he worried.
A lot.
What if Ren didn’t come back from a job?
What would Lucia do—or their son?
What would Rose do?
Diego?
It was just better he didn’t obsess over it. He barely thought about it at all now, and it was easier that way, honestly.
Shifting the backpack on his shoulder to ease a bit of the weight, Diego pulled the cell phone from his hoodie pocket. Turning on the screen and avoiding eye contact with anyone who thought to try as he navigated arrivals, he was quick to turn his phone off flight mode.
Just as fast, the device dinged.
And dinged again.
And again.
Again.
Diego sighed as the phone dinged over and over again in his hand with text after text and text. There were a couple of missed calls, too. A voice message or two, by the looks of it. Most came from his sister, some were from her husband, and there was a couple from Lucia. He didn’t have anything to say to Rose’s husband—they didn’t have the kind of relationship where Diego cared to text the man back. He would give Lucia a call later.
And probably his sister, too.
Probably.
Really, he just didn’t want to talk. Not when he felt like he had listened to Rose talk herself out for days leading up to his trip to Nevada. She had barely let him talk back at all. It had been less of a conversation and more of a lecture.
No, thanks.
He wasn’t up for doing that again. At least, not anytime soon. The only thing he intended to do during his stay in Vegas was figure out what exactly he wanted when he went back home. Whether it was chasing a dream he wasn’t sure was possible … or something else entirely. If anyone could help him make sense of the mess in his head, it was Renzo.
Diego considered putting his phone back on flight mode just to keep the damn thing from dinging again with another missed text or call, but he didn’t. Instead of focusing on the many notifications lighting up the banner on the screen, he shut the device off and shoved it back in the pocket of his hoodie.
Later, he thought.
He’d deal with all that later. Rose would be pissed that he didn’t reply to her many calls and messages as soon as his flight landed just to say that he was okay, but he figured she should probably expect that by now. He loved his sister—just like he loved his brother—but sometimes, he only wanted to be left alone.